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WILLIAM HINTON was born in Chicago in 1919. He first visited China in 1937 and in 1945 served as a propaganda analyst for the United States Army office of War Information in Kuming, Chongqing, Hankou, and Shanghai. In 1947 he served as a tractor technician for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and began to teach English at a rural university. Hinton soon found himself engulfed in the growing land reform movement sweeping through China. He accompanied a Communist Party work team to the village of Changzhuang (Long Bow) in central Shanxi province, to observe and record this extraordinary process of social reform. When he returned to the United States in 1953, McCarthyism was running rampant, and Hinton’s notes and diaries were seized by U.S. Customs officers. It would take three years of legal maneuvering by the United States Senate Internal Security Committee. After another lawsuit lasting nearly two years and costing over $6,000, Hinton finally won possession of his papers in 1958, but was denied a passport and forbidden to leave U.S. soil. In 1968 his passport was returned, but Hinton was unable to visit China due to the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1971, Hinton returned to China frequently as an agricultural consultant with local and international agencies, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, where he helped bring mechanization and farm equipment to selected villages. He has authored numerous books, including Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University (1972), Turning Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution (1972), Shenfan (1983), and The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 (1989). His final book, Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution (2006), was published posthumously. William Hinton died in 2004.
FANSHEN
A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
FANSHEN
A Documentary
of Revolution
in a Chinese Village
William Hinton
Copyright © 1966, 2008 by Monthly Review Press
All Rights Reserved
Cover illustration is taken from the first edition of Fanshen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Available from the publisher
ISBN: 978-1-58367-175-7 (paper)
Monthly Review Press
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Fanshen after Forty Years
Fred Magdoff
History does not refer merely...to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.
—James Baldwin
Why publish a new edition of Bill Hinton’s Fanshen in 2008? This is certainly a legitimate question considering the numerous changes and reversals of priorities that have occurred in China in the four decades since it was originally published and some sixty years after the events described in the book. Clearly unanticipated at the time of writing Fanshen, China is now well along the “capitalist road” under the leadership and control of the Communist Party. The short answer to the question of why republish Fanshen is that it is a remarkable book that has relevance today not only for China and students of history and social change, but for much of the third world.
Fanshen is one of the most important books written about the revolution in China. In fact, just the story of how Hinton’s book came into being—originally published by Monthly Review Press in 1966—is quite an epic tale itself. Bill literally carried his notes on his back as he walked out of Taihang Mountains in 1948 (attacked by the Kuomintang cavalry and airplanes on the way) only to have all his materials confiscated by the U.S. government when he reentered the United States in 1952. Bill went through a long legal battle to gain their release, was called to appear before the Senate Internal Security Committee, finally obtained the release of his notes in 1958, and then spent years writing and searching for a publisher. It was subsequently published in numerous languages and read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world interested in events in revolutionary China and what it might have to say about their own countries.
Land reform, designed to dismantle feudal power and exploitation, was central to the Communist wartime agenda. It became policy mainly because it was the only way to quickly help the poorest rural dwellers (and almost all of China’s population was rural at the time). But it was carried out initially in wartime—the period described in Fanshen—partially because of its power to demonstrate to the peasants that they had something to fight for and would therefore have a direct stake in helping the Eighth Route Army defeat the Japanese as well as the Kuomintang. (This is not dissimilar to the motivation behind Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the U.S. Civil War, aimed partially to galvanize slaves to flee Southern plantations and fight for the North.)
The term fanshen literally means to turn over. Hinton uses the term as it was used at the time to describe a literal turnover of resources as well as a transformation of power. It refers to the throwing off of the yoke of the landlords and the transferring of land—as well as housing, farm implements, carts, work animals, clothing—from the more wealthy villagers to the landless and poor peasants.
Hinton’s masterpiece deals with the momentous changes that occurred during the land reform “turn over” in Long Bow village—with a population of about 1,000 that had less than 1,000 acres of arable land—in North Central China’s Shanxi Province following the takeover by the Communist army, but before the country was completely liberated. Fanshen is essentially a documentary of life and transformation in Long Bow from 1946 through much of 1948. The reader becomes familiar with key participants, their physical appearances, backgrounds, foibles, and struggles. Hinton is outstanding in his perception of people and events and is able to portray a vivid picture of events in all their complexities. The reader also learns not only the larger issues and struggles and some of the history leading to the land reform but also gets to know the real human beings involved in the struggles—in all their humanness. Bill portrays their actions as encompassing the full range of human behavior, from the most altruistic to the most selfish.
Villages in the areas of northern China under control of revolutionary forces had undergone a first attempt at land reform in 1946-1947. This was an often chaotic and sometimes brutal affair—as old scores were settled frequently with violence, mistakes were made, and advantages were taken by many of those in authority. The Communist Party decided to study a sample of eleven villages in the county in which Hinton was working to see how well the policies had been accomplished, correct mistakes made during the process, and assist in developing policy for the remaining villages in the region. Hinton received permission to join the work party that was assigned to Long Bow, a village not far from the university where he was teaching. The work team assigned to the task of reviewing the situation and helping the village correct its course was led to believe that Long Bow was an especially troubled village that had made many mistakes in carrying out th
e Draft Agrarian Law. (It was a complex village, with a sizable population of Catholics. But, then again, most villages had complexities of one type or another.) One of the issues high on the work-team agenda was whether too many middle peasants had been attacked and had their property taken from them. The line of the Party was that only the very rich peasants and landlords and institutions—such as the Catholic Church—should have property confiscated and turned over to poor peasants and laborers. Middle and rich peasant property and the non-land property of the wealthy (stores, factories, etc.) were not supposed to be confiscated. The Party was attempting to keep the economy functioning and did not want to alienate a large portion of the populace; for example, approximately a third of Long Bow village before liberation consisted of middle peasant families.
One of the tasks of the work team—with active village participation—was to go through a classification of peasants into a number of categories. This process was complicated by the tensions that developed among the people. The poor, wanting more “fruits” for distribution, tended to want families classified higher than they objectively belonged. In contrast, the more well off wanted to be classified lower down so they would lose less (or no) property.
Although the process of fanshen was not meant to create complete equality, it did create near equality in the countryside, with the promise that those who were not able to benefit by fanshen (because of lack of local resources) would do so in the future. It helped to bring about what was probably the society that achieved the greatest equality in the twentieth century. But the land reform that is described in Fanshen was only the beginning of a history of twists and turns that included the collectivization of land in the commune system, the breakup of the commune system, and the implementation of the “family responsibility” system, decried in Hinton’s later writings. One of the issues that concerned Hinton was that the individually worked narrow “noodle” strips of land allocated as part of the “family responsibility” system, because of their small size and layout, could not be worked with machinery, making work harder than it needed to be. In addition, precious land that could have been growing crops was used for paths dividing the strips. He sought to improve productive operations and relations to better improve human lives.
Fanshen’s Lessons in Context of Later Changes in China
One of the important themes of Fanshen is the question of how to carry out a comprehensive transformation of society without becoming sidetracked by the old ways of thought and behavior. It was not uncommon in China for officials at all levels to take financial and personal advantages “due” them because of their status and to display cavalier and frequently disdainful behavior towards “ordinary” people. The new Communist Party members, while not openly feudal or endorsing capitalism, began to behave in ways, so ingrained by the old system, that were not incompatible with the previous society. The huge increase in the Party membership in a very short period of time also meant that many became members without fully understanding and learning the new modes of behavior and responsibilities needed by the revolution. Marx posed the difficult question about such changes in philosophical terms:
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach) [Note that “man” was not the word Marx used. He wrote “Mensch” which in German means “person” and applies equally to men and women.]
While the struggle between the ideology and ways of behaving of the old system and the new continued, a number of means were tried to bring about a victory by the proletariat and peasantry. Campaigns of criticism and self-criticism, in which the people had an active and democratic part, were the method chosen in China. The idea was that most people who had done bad things (beating people, robbing from the public, etc.), even those within the Communist Party, were capable of reform. The Party had grown so rapidly as more and more territory fell under Communist control that there was little time for the “educators” to be educated. In addition, as Marx pointed out (see above), this happens only through “revolutionary practice.” The “Wash the Face Movement” of 1947, described by Hinton but occurring before he reached Long Bow, was one of the earliest attempts to rectify behavior of cadres and address the critical issue posed by Marx. The “soiled” behavior of cadres needed to be addressed and corrected frequently as daily washing removed dirt from peoples’ faces. And the best way to do this was to consult the people and to go through a process of criticism by others as well as self-criticism. During the period that Hinton was in Long Bow, local Party members needed to be approved by the mass of the people for continued membership (passing the “gate”).
The process Hinton describes in Long Bow for the rectification of mistakes and transgressions of Party members and other leaders during the land reform process was but one of the early campaigns in China aimed at the same issue—how can you create a new society with people brought up, influenced, and corrupted by the old society? The answer appears to be continual vigilance, struggle, criticism, self-criticism, and removal of unsatisfactory cadres. The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, was the final (and failed) attempt to keep the Communist Party and China moving toward socialism. During this period Mao referred to the need to overcome the “capitalist roaders” within the Communist Party. It is now apparent that there really were members of the Party who desired to take China down the path to capitalism. Additionally, there were literally tens of thousands of bureaucrats that, in the absence of continued vigilance and struggle against old ways of behaving, had grown accustomed to their privileges and wanted more. (For a very different picture of the Cultural Revolution from the one that is normally portrayed, see the important book by Han Dong Ping, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China’s Rural Development, 1966-1976.)
Fanshen’s Lasting Influence and Relevance
Fanshen had a profound influence on generations of China scholars and students as well as on socialists and revolutionaries around the world. Hinton described events—centering around the struggle to implement land reform and the new relations among people in the face of a long history of ingrained class differences and local corruption. He was guided by a sympathetic approach to the Chinese Revolution, but always with a critical eye to understand and describe what was really happening.
So, how can the trials and tribulations during the land reform process that occurred in a small village in China in 1948 have relevance for today? First, of course, it is an amazing and fascinating story just by itself. But it is much more than that. It is a strong argument in support of people who live in rural areas and work the soil or have been dispossessed over generations and have a right to the land. And today land reform is on the agenda—or needs to be—of many countries from South Africa to India to Brazil to Venezuela and so on. As a current slogan in Venezuela says: “The destruction of the latifundia system [large privately owned estates] is the construction of socialism.”
In fact, land tenure issues are very much on the agenda in China today. The rural land is currently owned by the State, village, or township. But because of corruption at various levels involving the taking of land from farmers to transfer to developers there are many protests. About a third of the protests in China—and in 2005, according to the government, there were about 74,000 protests—are estimated to be sparked by rural communities fighting for their rights. At the time of writing this introduction, early 2008, there are calls by some farmers—that generally have the right to use the land for a specified period of time (frequently thirty years)—for outright privatization of land! A group of farme
rs wrote: “We reject the previous form of collective ownership. It cannot guarantee the farmers’ permanent rights to the land...and cannot prevent the illegal infringement by officials and thugs” (Reuters, 12/24/07). This demand for privatization is occurring mainly because farmers see it as the only way to protect themselves in response to the selling of land to developers by frequently corrupt village and town leaders with inadequate or no compensation to the farmers.
The issue of how to bring about a truly socialist society that is at once democratic (with most people participating, the right of recall of officials, etc.) and also satisfies the needs of the poorest people is one that can only be worked out country by country based on each one’s history and conditions. One aspect that is very clear—based on the experience of Russia and China—constant vigilance on the part of the mass of the people is necessary so as not to permit society to slip back into old ways. It is not easy for people to unlearn the modes of behavior of the capitalist (or semi-feudal) society and create new socialist men and women!
Venezuela is currently attempting a new approach to revolutionary change—building democratic socialism starting from the bottom. This is being attempted within a capitalist society by building cooperatives that are considered “socialist units of production,” as well as by agrarian reform. Venezuela is turning more and more power over to the people at the local level while trying to break the grip of capitalism and imperialism on the country and the rest of Latin America at the same time. While the gains in land reform (with much more to do), feeding the poor, health promotion, and building new “socialist” units of production such as the food processing plants and new tractor factories are remarkable, perhaps the most impressive aspect of Venezuela today is the attempt to actually turn over power to the people at the most local level. Councils are setting priorities for investment in their communities and propose projects to the municipal government. A very high percent of the municipality’s funds are now going to the local councils to implement approved projects, which include building schools and clinics, repairing roads, bringing water to the community, etc. Although the other aspects mentioned above are extremely important, this is the heart of the attempt to build socialism from the ground up. Venezuela’s socialist project is fraught with significant internal dangers—including corruption and a large middle- and upper-class opposition that fully comprehends what it stands to lose—as well as active attempts by the U.S. government to destabilize the country. The main themes of Fanshen—implementing an agrarian reform that breaks the old power structure, creating new conditions and possibilities in the countryside, and maintaining local control over a committed cadre truly committed to serve the people—are being played out in Venezuela today.